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Generative AI (“genAI”) offers meaningful opportunities to accelerate these investigations and automate administrative tasks that traditionally consume investigators’ time. While AI cannot replace human judgment, it can significantly shorten investigative timelines, accelerating insights and freeing up skilled professionals to focus on high-value findings and remediation of compliance and risk issues both in internal and external matters.
Through this article, the team from intelligENS, ENS’ specialist legal technology division, discusses how genAI is transforming routine and complex investigations.
The case for modernising investigations with genAI has never been clearer
For corporates and law firms facing tight timelines, sprawling and diverse data, and mounting regulatory expectations, responsible use of genAI embedded in modern eDiscovery platforms compresses days or weeks into hours. By rapidly processing large datasets, it enables targeted analysis across emails, chat messages, meeting recordings and other modern data sources to surface what matters.
Investigation teams achieve faster answers and identify hidden patterns with stronger governance and the evidential integrity boards, auditors, and regulators expect.
With specialist eDiscovery support, corporates and law firms can augment their internal capabilities to deliver speed with certainty, without compromising security, forensic integrity or defensibility and meeting internal and external standards on AI governance, both locally and abroad.
What genAI embedded in eDiscovery platforms changes in investigation data review
Modern eDiscovery blends defensible forensic methods with genAI to surface key evidence early, even in data sets spanning millions of documents. Guided by clear prompts tied to the scope of the investigation, genAI can classify and summarise documents against each allegation, uncover covert language, highlight people, time periods and themes of interest, whilst rapidly pinpointing the “smoking gun”. The result is earlier visibility that directly informs scoping, chronology, interview strategy and remediation planning. If an internal investigation escalates to employee-related discipline, litigation or other regulatory attention, the methodology seamlessly transitions to withstand scrutiny, as set out in our previous article,accelerating legal disputes with gen-AI enhanced review
Crucially, genAI takes the guesswork out of data reviews. Embedding genAI into eDiscovery is changing how investigation teams find facts, manage risk, and brief regulators, cutting time to insight while strengthening defensibility. Leading eDiscovery platforms align with emerging international principles on trustworthy and responsible AI, emphasising transparency, accountability, and risk management.
- GenAI is accountable by design
When deployed within secure jurisdictional-appropriate eDiscovery platforms, every step is logged and explainable, with reasoning for the AI output decisions and traceable links to the original source evidence. Investigators can test prompts, see why items were surfaced (and others not), and reduce language exclusion inherent in keyword searching. The result is faster internal briefings and earlier, confident regulator dialogue, with clear human accountability throughout. From day one, audit trails cover evidence sources and custodians, preservation and processing decisions, model versions, prompts, validation and corrective actions.
- GenAI finds facts faster, smarter than keywords
Traditional keyword searching forces investigators to predict exact language even when bad actors obfuscate, switch languages, misspell, or speak in code, creating a trade-off between wading through irrelevant information and missing the hidden needle in the digital haystack. GenAI enables natural-language questions across large volumes of documents, bringing what matters most to the forefront so investigators can test hypotheses and follow the facts, rather than embark on wild-goose chases. GenAI reads like a human reviewer, searches by concept not keyword, recognises tone and context, learns matter‑specific vocabulary as you iterate, surfaces “unknown unknowns,” and explains why it thinks a document is relevant - identifying patterns that may have been missed by a busy, fatigued human. As we predict that genAI will become the primary engine for finding truth, search terms still have a role in supporting data minimisation requirements and pinpointing issues once genAI has surfaced the likely misconduct.
- GenAI turns interview packs into real-time assistants
As genAI summarises and answers questions in real-time, investigators walk into interviews with a live digital chronology linked to source evidence. When a witness references “that December call”, the AI transcription of the call, surrounding context and adjacent conversations are immediately accessible to fact-check on the spot, refresh recollection and reduce interview follow-ups. Where recording is permissible, a searchable transcript becomes available post-interview for genAI-assisted analysis to expose gaps or inconsistencies that were not apparent in the room.
- GenAI deployed responsibly across borders
Privilege, security and confidentiality are built in to meet stringent jurisdictions, with well-governed workflows in data minimisation, cross-border transfer assessments and defensibility of the investigation findings. “Trust, but verify” is operationalised through aligning modern tools to multi-jurisdictional compliance and organisational requirements. Digitised, repeatable playbooks embedded in genAI document reviews begin with scoping data sources and custodians to designing prompts that responsibly target the alleged conduct. This frees budget and investigator time for strategic work, such as, interviews. remediation planning and board updates.
What investigators gain
Investigation teams are equipped with proven eDiscovery technology and defensible methodology, without the overhead of building an internal eDiscovery function
- Adoption is a change programme as much as a technology decision. Investigation playbooks help investigators integrate genAI review tools. Playbooks should embed legal technologies certified to relevant security standards and operated in line with GDPR, including appropriate processor terms, transfer safeguards, and data minimisation controls. When workloads spike or timelines compress, playbooks enable investigation teams to confidently outsource large-scale document reviews to eDiscovery and genAI review specialists, whilst investigators stay firmly in control of the wider investigation, including case strategy, interviews and key decisions.
- Embedding quality control checks ensures outcomes are consistent and reliable. This includes monitoring model performance using statistically valid sampling metrics (precision, recall and elusion rate), tracking what may have been missed and re-iterating the AI model accordingly, and defining escalation triggers when AI outputs conflict with case knowledge, all supported by a clear review protocol, scope and audit trail.
- Technology is only as effective as the team driving it. As with any subject matter expert, legal technologists are increasingly called upon to explain the role of technology in plain language to courts, regulators and auditors, provide training to help investigators get the best results from genAI and maintain version-controlled prompts as privileged work product. An eDiscovery team should pair cross‑jurisdictional lawyers with certified eDiscovery professionals, forensic and digital investigators, and data scientists with a track record of converting complex datasets into admissible evidence, coherent narratives, stakeholder-ready reporting, and genAI assisted reviews across whistleblowing, ABC/sanctions, financial misstatement, HR, cyber and data privacy matters.
Conclusion: faster insight, strong defensibility
Used responsibly, genAI-enabled eDiscovery is already changing how routine and complex investigations are run. Secure data foundations and explainable AI outputs shorten investigation cycles, enabler earlier action on facts and set a tone from the top to reduce further misconduct. This is relevant innovation, not experimentation. Trust the technology - but verify it. Keep humans in the loop, keep the chain of evidence intact, and make every conclusion traceable back to the evidence. DM
Authors: Linda Sheehan, Head at intelligENS, Ettiene Beneke, Practice Lead at intelligENS, and Megan Claassens, Practice Lead at intelligENS.